Author ORCID Identifier
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2018
College/Unit
Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
Department/Program/Center
Sociology and Anthropology
Abstract
Research has suggested that public confidence in the scientific community has become politicized, but it is not clear that liberals and conservatives disagree on the more fundamental question of what counts as being scientific. An analysis of General Social Survey data finds that political conservatism is negatively associated with an individual’s rating of sociology as being scientific. This association is not found when examining ratings of economics or biology. Education moderates this association, as the gap between liberals’ and conservatives’ ratings of sociology’s scientific-ness is greater among those with more education. Although research has demonstrated that trust in the scientific community has become politicized, these findings demonstrate that the perceived boundaries of science can also be influenced by political ideology.
Digital Commons Citation
Scheitle, Chris, "Politics and the Perceived Boundaries of Science: Activism, Sociology, and Scientific Legitimacy" (2018). Faculty & Staff Scholarship. 1232.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/faculty_publications/1232
Source Citation
Scheitle, C. P. (2018). Politics and the Perceived Boundaries of Science: Activism, Sociology, and Scientific Legitimacy. Socius. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023118769544
Comments
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
This article received support from the WVU Libraries' Open Access Author Fund.